Xbox appears to troll Fortnite fans by hinting at non-existent tournament

For a brief moment, Fortnite’s Xbox crew thought they had a major tournament on the horizon.

On Monday, Epic Games and Sony announced another $100,000+ Fortnite PlayStation-exclusive Cup, the third of these events in the last five months alone. This was disappointing news to many Xbox players who have been desperate for something similar to compete in for a while now.

The lack of Xbox tournaments probably comes down to Microsoft choosing not to sponsor any. Therefore it seemed a little like they were rubbing salt in the wounds with recent social media comments.

It all started with a classic joke that often happens within the Fortnite community on Twitter. Someone shared a post from the $1,000,000 Xbox Cup in 2019, people didn’t notice the date and started getting excited. Pretty standard stuff.

However, the official @Xbox Twitter account then started replying to fans’ responses. “Big announcement today” and “Find a great group” were a couple of the messages that quickly generated false hope.

Seeing that they were being taken seriously, Xbox then appeared to back-pedal, saying things like “Don’t grind just yet! We were just excited about the Fortnite Xbox Cup from 2019” to clear it up.

While they were undoubtedly only messing around and trying to get in on the meme, this bait from Xbox was not received particularly fondly by many of their users. Of course, there’s still a chance that they were teasing an upcoming event, but I wouldn’t get too excited.

Since Epic put an end to the console FNCS midway through Chapter 2, players on Xbox and PlayStation, as well as mobile and Nintendo Switch, have been underwhelmed with the amount of platform-specific competition.

Though recent seasons have featured a Console Champions Cup, with good prize money and open qualification, this occurs over just one weekend. These console cups always had record numbers of participation, so it is slightly surprising we don’t see more of them.